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Updated: May 24, 2025
So chaste was their embrace, that the old grandam suddenly awaking, they remained before her as they were without any confusion or embarrassment. It was six days before the sailing for Iceland. Their wedding procession was returning from Ploubazlanec Church, driven before a furious wind, under a sombre, rain-laden sky.
Night was always fallen when she arrived home; before she could enter she had to go down a little over the worn rocks, for the cottage was placed on an incline towards the beach, below the level of the Ploubazlanec roadside. It was almost hidden under its thick brown straw thatch, and looked like the back of some huge beast, shrunk down under its bristling fur.
One might imagine heavy sea-guns shooting out their deafening boom in the distance, but that was only the sea hammering the coast of Ploubazlanec on all points; undoubtedly it did not appear contented, and Gaud felt her heart shrink at this dismal music, which no one had ordered for their wedding-feast.
And sleep having come, notwithstanding love and an impulse to weep, she threw herself roughly in her bed, hiding her face in the silken masses floating round her outspread like a veil. In her hut in Ploubazlanec, Granny Moan, who was on the other and darker side of her life, had also fallen to sleep the frozen sleep of old age dreaming of her grandson and of death.
Being more cultivated than he, Gaud could understand this, and read between the lines that deep affection that was unexpressed. Several times in the four-paged letter, he called her by the title of "wife," as if happy in repeating the word. And the address above: "A Madame Marguerite Gaos, maison Moan, en Ploubazlanec" she was "Madame Marguerite Gaos" since so short a time.
On the market-place, where there were games and acrobats, she walked up and down with her friends, who named and pointed out to her from time to time the young men of Paimpol or Ploubazlanec. And directly Gaud was struck with one of them, tall as a giant, with huge shoulders almost too broad; but she had simply said, perhaps with a touch of mockery: "There is one who is tall, to say the least!"
At last he arrived, in his best clothes also, apologizing, without any embarrassment, to the bride's party. The excuse was, that some important shoals of fish, not at all expected, had been telegraphed from England, as bound to pass that night a little off Aurigny; and so all the boats of Ploubazlanec hastily had set sail.
With the money they built an upper story to their house, which was situated at the point of Ploubazlanec, at the very land's end, in the hamlet of Pors-Even, overlooking the sea, and having a grand outlook. "It is mighty tough, though," said he, "this here life of an Icelander, having to start in February for such a country, where it is awful cold and bleak, with a raging, foaming sea."
The other Icelandes present were disappointed at not having been warned in time, like the fishers of Ploubazlanec, of the fortune that was skirting their very shores. But it was too late now, worse luck! So they gave their arms to the lasses, the violins began to play, and joyously they all tramped out.
Summer advanced, and, at the end of August, with the first autumnal mists, the Icelanders came home. For the last three months the two lone women had lived together at Ploubazlanec in the Moan's cottage. Gaud filled a daughter's place in the poor birthplace of so many dead sailors.
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